7 Signs You Are Verbally Abusive
You engage in:
1. Name calling. Using name calling as a way to degrade, demean, and hurt the people in your life
2. Blaming. Constantly blaming the person for every less than favorable aspect of your day
3. Gaslighting. Mentally manipulating someone to make them feel crazy or confused.
4. Silent treatment. Withholding contact is a sure way of shutting someone out and making them feel lonely, rejected, and abandoned.
5. Guilting. Behaving a certain way with the intention of making your partner feel guilty for something he or she has done.
6. Screaming.
7. Preying on specific people. Picking on people you consider “weaker” individuals or people you know will stay with you despite your poor treatment of them.

TW: domestic abuse
An emotional painting from me. I just want to say that i think there's an expectation that domestic abuse is obvious, in films you see a woman trying to hide black eyes and bruises, when in reality what goes on behind doors is normally concealed to stay there. Bruises often in places where nobody will see them. Sometimes there aren't bruises, sometimes it's psychological abuse. To be manipulated and put down so consistently that you feel you don't have a voice, you lose your confidence in yourself and you find yourself isolated from your friends, you feel trapped. They strip you of your identity so you become increasingly dependant on them and less willful to leave. You become a shell of the person you were. If a woman you know gets into a relationship and starts to change how she looks, withdraws, maybe falls of the grid, these are warning signs. Often these men appear the most charming, at a first glance you wouldn't suspect, that's how they get away with it. Always check in on your friends. I feel that often we give up on people that fall off the grid, when really so often there is a more harrowing trouble growing in the background. Maybe it's a woman who's in an abusive relationship, or maybe it's a man battling depression alone, it could be anyone and anything but I honesltly believe that so many statistics could be avoided if we just made the effort to check in. That's all I wanted to say really.
https://www.idas.org.uk/
#domesticabuse #domesticviolence#misogyny#speakup#violenceagainstwomen

Did you know that every 9 seconds a woman is beaten in the USA? We are priviledged to have Jeffrey Brown who is the Vice President of Development & Marketing for the Partnership Against Domestic Violence join us on stage in October. The Partnership Against Domestic Violence is also our chairty of choice and will be recieving partial proceeds from the event. This particular organization is one that is extremly close to our hearts 💕

If you only show up to the conversation to dismiss realities, you have no place in the conversation until you are willing to learn. •
Rape culture is real. The patriarchy is real. The violence women and femmes experience daily is soul wrenchingly, pit of my stomach pain, real. So men, please stop entering he conversation ONLY when you want to minimise or dismiss these experiences. You are a rape apologist. You are upholding the systems and beliefs that allow this to happen. You are extricating a form of violence into the world with your woes. •
I speak of sexual violence against men. I try my hardest to ally and speak on behalf of men that are silenced. But never when violence against men and boys is spoken of do I see men slide into the comments and say “what about women”. Never when a serious violent crime of a different nature is committed do I see people coming so easily and readily to the perpetrators defence. •
I may often ignore such comments- knowing they are trolling for a response but no real converse. But something here got my back up and I felt the need to reply. I scratched the surface- and apparently also the wafer thin layer of his male fragility. •
I wasn’t going to post this, but I listened to a beautiful episode of @summerinnanen Podcast where she spoke with Erin Brown and their words inspired me. •
It may have been a small off the cuff comment. But small comments are part of the larger infrastructure that keeps rape culture alive and kicking. And I’m tired, I am so very tired, of women’s/femmes experiences not only being dismissed, but turned on them with malice and blame.
Your words are violence, your words are upholding a system that silences and ignores, your words are denying the acknowledgement of anything ever happening.
Without acknowledgement there is simply suffering and no healing. Stop denying survivors the right to heal.